Too often lost in our understanding of the American Cold War
crisis, with its nuclear brinkmanship and global political chess
game, is the simultaneous crisis on the nation's racial front.
"Reckoning Day" is the first book to examine the relationship of
African Americans to the atom bomb in postwar America. It tells the
wide-ranging story of African Americans' response to the atomic
threat in the postwar period. It examines the anti-nuclear writing
and activism of major figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., and Lorraine Hansberry as well as the placement
(or absence) of black characters in white-authored doomsday fiction
and nonfiction. Author Jacqueline Foertsch analyzes the work of
African American thinkers, activists, writers, journalists,
filmmakers, and musical performers in the "atomic" decades of 1945
to 1965 and beyond. Her book tells the dynamic story of commitment
and interdependence, as these major figures spoke with force and
eloquence for nuclear disarmament, just as they argued unstintingly
for racial equality on numerous other occasions.
Foertsch also examines the location of African American
characters in novels, science fiction, and survivalist nonfiction
such as government-sponsored forecasts regarding post-nuclear
survival. In these, black characters are often displaced or
absented entirely: in doomsday narratives they are excluded from
executive decision-making and the stories' often triumphant
conclusions; in the nonfiction, they are rarely envisioned amongst
the "typical American" survivors charged with rebuilding US
society. Throughout "Reckoning Day," issues of placement and
positioning provide the conceptual framework: abandoned at "ground
zero" (America's inner cities) during the height of the atomic
threat, African Americans were figured in white-authored survival
fiction as compliant servants aiding white victory over atomic
adversity, while as historical figures they were often perceived as
"elsewhere" (indifferent) to the atomic threat. In fact, African
Americans' "position" on the bomb was rarely one of silence or
indifference. Ranging from appreciation to disdain to vigorous
opposition, atomic-era African Americans developed diverse and
meaningful positions on the bomb and made essential contributions
to a remarkably American dialogue.
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